LA Golf Blade Putter: Can a $1,500 flat stick help your performance on the greens?
Gear: LA Golf Blade putter
Price: $1,500 with graphite shaft and Winn Jumbo Lite DRI TAC grip
Specs: Milled carbon composite head with milled 303 stainless steel face insert and adjustable tungsten sole weights. 33″ to 36″
Who it’s For: Deep-pocketed golfers who want extreme forgiveness and stability on the greens with a more consistent roll.
The Skinny: Designing the head using carbon composite allowed LA Golf to make a massive heel-toe weighted blade putter with extreme perimeter weighting for increased stability and forgiveness.
The Deep Dive: For the past few years, LA Golf (LAGP) has been making a name for itself by making high-performance graphite shafts for Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and a growing number of tour players. Many of them not only use those shafts in their woods but also in their putters because the ultra-stiff graphite shafts can help reduce twisting on off-center hits.
LAGP recently purchased SIK (Study In Kinematics) and now has released its first tip-to-grip club offering, a blade-style putter that blends LAGP’s expertise with carbon materials with one of SIK’s key technologies.
It's big
The LA Golf Blade is significantly larger than traditional blade putters. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
The first thing that every golfer will notice when he or she puts a LAGP putter down behind a golf ball is that it has a massive blade length. There is a cutout in the back flange designed that helps to bracket the ball and a single black alignment line, but the face dwarfs the ball. At the same time, it feels much lighter in your hands than you might expect. Something this large should be heavy, right?
To pull off that trick, LAGP designed the head using 435 layers of carbon composite and then milling it into shape. Typically, putters are milled from some type of stainless steel, carbon composite is significantly lighter, so the putter can be made larger and still have the same swingweight at the same length.
Extreme MOI
Some of the saved weight has been shifted to the bottom of the club in the form of metal injection molded tungsten weight screws in the heel and toe. The standard weights are 70 grams each, but 90-gram weights are available too. Putting this much weight on the perimeter of the head (which is already big) greatly enlarges the sweet spot and increases the head’s resistance to twisting on mis-hit putts, so they roll straighter and nearly as far as well-struck putts.
The stability of the LA Golf putter is also enhanced by the wide-diameter, low-torque graphite shaft that comes standard with the club.
Descending loft for more consistency
The LA Golf Blade putter has a stainless steel face insert with variable loft. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
The help golfers create a more consistent roll, LAPG added SIK’s signature technology to the milled stainless steel face, Descending Loft Technology. It divides the grooved face into four areas that stretch from heel to toe, with the top quarter having 4 degrees of loft and each quarter below it decreasing in loft by 1 degree. Golfers who have a forward press will benefit from having extra loft, while players who swing up into their putts and strike the ball low in the face (which naturally adds loft) will make contact in a low-loft region. Normalizing the way the ball comes off the face should, according to SIK and LA Golf, lead to more consistency.
How does it perform?
The LAGP Blade putter excels at helping golfers get the ball rolling on their intended line. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
At $1,500, this putter is going to be well beyond the means of most golfers (including yours truly), but LAGP made one available for me to try for this article. Here are a few thoughts after rolling putts with it for about 30 minutes.
Sound and Feel. Many aspects of putting ara subjective, like sound and feel. What sounds like a Stratovarius to your ears can sound like sketching tires to someone else. I found the LA Golf Blade sounded slightly higher in pitch than the stainless steel blade putters I brought to the practice green for comparison. It was not offputting, but well-struck putts lacked the deep, solid sound many blade putter users might prefer.
Forgiveness. With this much perimeter weighting and an ultra-stiff graphite shaft, I expected mis-hit putts to perform well, and they did. When I intentionally hit the ball near the toe or the heel, putts still rolled fairly straight and there was only a small loss of distance, so I would expect that after players get used to the LA Golf putter, lag putting performance could improve.
The grip. Having quiet hands in your putting stroke is a good thing, but golfers who are not used to oversized grips may need a while to get used to the Winn Jumbo Lite DRI TAC grip that comes standard on the LA Golf putter. That said, any fitter or pro shop should be able to install a different putter grip on the club.
Innovation vs. Novelty. It is great to see brands trying new things and developing ideas that can make the game more fun, but at a time when graphite putter shafts are still a rarity away from the PGA and LPGA tours, we’re a long way from carbon composite putter heads getting any traction. You may never see one of these at your local club, but it shows what can be done and what might be possible in the future.
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